gold rush
I’m on a rooftop downtown, drinking cheap wine out of a red solo cup taking in an all too familiar view of my home city. It’s the view I’d see traveling to see relatives as a kid, face pressed up against the window in awe of just how tall those buildings can be. There’s traffic, but I don’t mind. Gives me more time to imagine what my life might look like as a “big kid” when I have a “big girl job.” I’m nine and I’m strategizing the ways I’ll be a boss of some company that does something important (I hadn’t thought that far ahead) in a suit and a briefcase and an office that looks over the entire city. Now, I’m twenty-three, strategizing the way I won’t let my home city eat me up and swallow me whole.
I made the decision to move back to Dallas months ago, and at the time I thought it would be the same. I would know my way around, settle back into a routine I had known for two decades of my life, have a matching license plate to everyone around me. I’d be home. But I find myself realizing that growing up these last four years in a state away has proven to change what I thought I knew about my home city.
It’s the boroughs of downtown, with their respective characteristics I had never needed to know beforehand. It’s which bars have the best espresso martinis, upscale restaurants I’ve never heard of. It’s the best salons for acrylic sets that aren’t too overpriced, which highway to take to get home the quickest.
I lament all of this staring up at the ceiling. I’ve never liked a gold rush. There’s boxes back home in my single bedroom apartment I haven’t gotten around to unpacking, three months after I got the keys. My childhood bedroom is slowly being parceled out, each trip to my lifelong home ends with me leaving with stuff I deliberately left. I keep thinking I’ll wake up one morning back to college classes and calling my dad for an extra grocery allowance, but I never do.
I don’t like a gold rush.
I’ve always thought I’d be able to somehow balance my big career goals with being down-to-earth, but it’s becoming harder these days to act like I don’t care. I straddle the line between being a “big kid” with a credit card, to a child nodding along to discussions about the in’s and out’s of business, the way money is discussed and shelled out. Does that make me a fraud? That I worked so hard to be authentic, only to end up making it a selling point over cocktails?
I joke that I’m “rebranding” myself, officially going by Claire and foregoing diluting my personality, my intelligence. I try to play it down, as if I’m not acting out a role I wanted for so long. I smooth the white tablecloth in front of me, silently wishing I went to cotillion years ago, trying to remember to keep my elbows off the table, my drink to my right. I keep reminding myself to not dissociate - I’m on the 49th floor, surrounded by people in tailored suits and dresses, overlooking Uptown. I’ve dreamt of this.
But I don’t like a gold rush. I keep my old sorority sweatshirts and beat up Tevas, shuffling through my single bedroom apartment. Each Monday I go back to my childhood home (fiending for a home cooked meal), describing what new places I went to over the weekend to my mom, who has lived here longer than me, but somehow we keep learning new things through my new routine. I reminisce with my dad, about how awful the start of this year was for me, and how I’m a million light years away from all of that. I may not know the steps, but I’m learning the dance to this new cadence of my life. And as much as it comes with its materialism, its greed, its luxury - I think I’m starting to enjoy it against my better judgment.
“If you had the chance, would you do anything in your life differently?” I don’t mean to laugh, but I do. What a question to ask someone who couldn’t imagine herself living up to this moment six months into the future. I set down my overpriced coffee charged to an Amex that isn’t mine, and smile. “No. I’m the version of myself now that I always wanted to be.”
